-
Leaving a home for a home
Every summer holiday I’d lay awake on the narrow bed and listen to the only other piece of furniture in the room – the hulking wardrobe, as the beetles dined. This was the nightly ritual at my grandparents’ cottage, where the insects would feast en masse during the dark, tapping their mandibles loud against the ...
-
Drink and Revive: The rise of Barcade
Video games owe a great deal to the American bar. It was here, on sticky carpets, before glinting taps and amidst woozy patrons, that the medium made its public debut — when Atari founder Nolan Bushnell installed his first arcade cabinet, Computer Space, in the Dutch Goose near Stanford University in 1971. The video game ...
-
Shooters: How Video Games Fund Arms Manufacturers
The American confectionery company Victoria Sweets claims to have invented the candy cigarette. A thin stick of chocolate, wrapped in edible paper and designed to impersonate a roll-up, the sweet debuted in 1915 and soon became the accessory of choice for children keen to play grown-up. Hollywood star, GI Joe, team captain: the candy cigarette ...
-
Who spilled Hot Coffee?
Not for the first time that month, Patrick Wildenborg was disoriented. With a one year-old baby in the house he was familiar with the fug of a deep sleep cut short by noise. But this awakening was different. It was prompted not by an infant’s wail but the hysteria of a telephone ringing in the ...
-
In search of Nolan Bushnell, gaming’s absent father
Asteroids arrests. Piercing white vector lines bisect the screen’s black void, issuing a flickering beacon out towards the bar, as if to plead: ‘play me, save us’. If you catch its gaze you can’t look away, pulled towards the machine as if drawn in a tractor beam. Break the spell and you notice the other ...
-
The Blame Game
NOTE: An edited version of this column first appeared on The Guardian’s Comment Is Free here. The aftermath of any public killing spree will include tears, candlelit vigils and, if the perpetrator is under the age of 40, a spotlight on video games questioning whether their shadow falls across the story. At one time these ...
-
Jenova Chen: Journeyman
“There’s this quotation from St Augustine…” Jenova Chen puts down his hamburger and fixes me with a warm but firm stare. Trust the designer of Flower and Journey to invoke a 3rd century theologian as an entry point to the subject of online tea-bagging. “Augustine wrote: ‘People will venture out to the height of the ...
-
Weight Watchers’ new game – a tough diet pill to swallow
“Play to Win” declares the new Weight Watchers slogan, although “Play to Lose” would surely be a more appropriate battle cry to lead those resolved to shed the Christmas pounds in the new year diet game. The UK is the fattest nation in Europe and with the number of obese adults in the country forecast ...
-
The Bug and the Windscreen
“The way I see it, sometimes I’m the bug and sometimes I’m the windscreen. “I’ll have a night when I’m unstoppable. I hit every enemy and every enemy misses me. Win after win. You ever get a night like that? I love a night like that. “And then, you know, the next morning I can’t ...
-
The Boy Who Stole Half-Life 2
At 6am on 7th May 2004, Axel Gembe awoke in the small German town of Schönau im Schwarzwald to find his bed surrounded by police officers. Automatic weapons were pointing at his head and the words “Get out of bed. Do not touch the keyboard” were ringing in his ears. Gembe knew why they were ...
-
Thinking Outside of the Box
The review I wrote of Nintendo’s commemorative 25th anniversary edition of the Famicom Super Mario games last week proved divisive. Not only were many of Eurogamer’s readers unhappy with my approach, but ex-Amiga Power journalist, Stuart Campbell felt compelled to write a rather scathing attack on my approach on his blog. That kind of thing ...
-
Katamari Damacy’s Takahashi On Life After Namco
What a difference a year makes. At the 2009 Nottingham GameCity festival, Keita Takahashi, creator of the joyful Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy, seemed lost. In a damp house on the outskirts of Nottingham, he worked with balls of plasticine, lengths of string and piles of bended paperclips in search of the design for ...